PROFESSOR P. A.

BRUNT

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In the year of his seventy-fifth birthday, the Society salutes Professor Peter Brunt, its
President from 1980 to I983, vigorous adviser over many years in its councils, and indefatigable
contributor to the pages of this Journal. Addressing the Society in 196i with his paper, 'The
army and the land in the Roman Revolution', Peter Brunt was praised for his many and notable
contributions to the Journal. Protesting that the compliment was undeserved, he was
reassured that it was 'proleptic'. The forecast could not have been more apt. Over the three
decades from I958 to I986, he published articles and review articles in no less than seventeen
issues of RS, amounting to some 294 pages. Many of these papers have become classics, from
which our reading of Roman history now starts; as a group they have made a fundamental

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P. A. BRUNT

impact on our study of Roman history, and lent their character to this Journal in the process.
There are few Roman historians this century who have seized so unerringly the key issues,
above all social and economic, of the late Republic and early Empire and marked them so
firmly with the stamp of their auctoritas.
The old age of Camden professors is green, and it would be absurdly premature to
attempt to assess the importance of Peter Brunt's ceuvre. Since his 'retirement' in 1982, his
output has continued with all the vigour and weight of earlier years. Two massive volumes,
The Fall of the Roman Republic (reviewed in JRS 79 (1989), I5I-6) and Roman Imperial
have offered far more than convenient republication of
Themes (JRS 8i (I991), 199-201),
them
in
together and supplementing them with major new
gathering
previous papers;
material, they have revealed the magisterial coherence and consistency of his approach and
methods. Another volume, no less weighty, of the essential papers omitted from those
collections (including seven in this Journal alone) could with benefit be published. Much more
is on its way: a collection of papers old and new on Greek history, ranging from Herodotus and
Thucydides to Plato and Aristotle, approaches publication (Ancient Greek History and
Thought). Meanwhile a new volume is in gestation on a theme dear to him since the beginning
of his career, Stoicism in the Principate.
Intimate though he is with Stoic thought, he is not easily to be identified with any
philosophical creed or school of thought, nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri. But while
he rejects approaches to history based on theory, there is a clear philosophical basis in his
method: in an empiricist tradition which draws strength from the Oxford philosophical
component of Greats, he believes in the methodical testing of propositions against all available
evidence, in full awareness of its deficiencies (The Fall, 87ff.). In the logical rigour with which
he pursues this project, and the mastery of the literary, epigraphic and legal sources which he
brings to bear on it, he has no equal. To this he adds the gift of a head for numbers that has
made him equally at home with the revenues of Rome and the revenues of Gonville and Caius.
He is philosophical too in eschewing flowers of style: his style is one of perspicuous clarity, in
which every word is weighed, and meaning is plain; ambiguity and evasion are foreign to it.
As he presents his philosophy, its impulse is negative; he would claim that a determining factor
in his research has always been the refutation of positions he believes false. But the method
does not explain the choice of topics on which he brings it to bear. Since his (never completed)
doctoral project under Hugh Last on the relationship of governing classes and governed from
Augustus to Constantine (in which Stoicism was no more than a sub-plot), he has shown an
instinct for questions of central importance (rarely coincident with those set for Greats essays,
though they have changed the agenda even for those). That instinct probably has much to do
with a passion for modern history dating back to his childhood; that in turn doubtless has
much to do with his openness to techniques of demography, social and comparative history
that make Italian Manpower, alongside its accessible counterpart, Social Conflicts in the
Roman Republic, such a watershed in the writing of Roman social history.
Belonging to no school, he has created no school (something which would in any case be at
variance with Oxford traditions of pluralism). Yet his pupils in the profession, whether
undergraduate pupils from Oriel (his own college, where he was taught by Marcus Niebuhr
Tod), graduate pupils, or other scholars, young and old, from this country and abroad, whom
he has so liberally helped with advice, are many, and in their various ways reveal their debt to
his impact, whether their work has been on subjects close to his preferences or otherwise. He
has described his own supervisor, Last, as 'awful - in the old-fashioned sense of the term'. He
himself has his measure of awe, for nobody has so quick an eye for missing items of evidence
and logical fallacies, and few can rival his knack of exposing the flaws in a paper - only the
innocent are lulled into a sense of security by his semblance of dozing through a presentation.
But the frankness of his criticism and the sureness of his control of the evidence are what, in
alliance with ever-present willingness to listen, read, comment and discuss, and with the
warmth and loyalty of his friendship, have made him a light by which younger scholars may set
their own courses. He sees Roman history as a vast and dark cavern, lit by a few flickering
candles (The Fall, 92): few have lit larger or more steadily burning candles than he. We look
forward to the lighting of many more.
A. W.-H.